Hi James,
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When you have sincerely decided to act on your excellent insight that taking “the easy way out” is not enough (because it only results in a resigned attitude towards life), the first thing to do is to read the instruction manual, i.e. “This Moment of Being Alive” including the very instructive tool-tips.
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Then you check if you enjoy and appreciate each moment of being alive, because the latter is the key to both increasing your enjoyment and consequently your appreciation of being alive.
To understand the word appreciation you can look at its opposite - depreciation = devaluation, cheapening, reduction in value, disparage. Hence appreciation means assessing of the true worth or value of persons or things and thus adding value, enriching, encouraging (the expansion of your value assessment), highly regarding, cherishing, marvelling.
Appreciation is the very key to exponentially increase the level of your enjoyment, expand it in scope and depth, so that you are able to see more and more how the universe is happening with wondrous perfection in all the various, minute and large, details of life and matter. Encouraging naiveté is an essential ingredient to marvelling, delight and wonderment.
Note: without applying appreciation one would merely dabble in the real-world self-help advice of “don’t worry, be happy” [link] which has naught to do with the actualism method.
- With the ongoing increase in appreciation and the consequent appreciative enjoyment it will be easy to follow Richard’s instructions further –
[Richard]: “one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy and harmless’ … and after that to ‘feeling excellent’ […] to the point of excellence being the norm”.
[Richard]: Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention – exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination … and fascination leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur. An apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to being fully alive right now. This moment is your only moment of being alive … one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever you are, one is always here … even if you start walking over to ‘there’, along the way to ‘there’ you are always here … and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is always here … and it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is already here, and it is always now … then one has arrived before one starts.
- Then, when your are more and more at home feeling excellent you can make the daring decision (as an active step) to let the universe live you, in lieu of ‘you’ dictating and controlling your life.
[Richard]: Lastly, the actualism method segues into what has become known as the actualism process when the actualism method has become so automatic, via habituation, that one is walking about in a state of wide-eyed wonder (naiveté) simply marvelling at being alive (sensuosity) and being amazed/ delighted that all this – the world about/the universe itself – is occurring in the first place; the actualism process is when it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the difference between one doing it (doing this business called being alive) and it happening of its own accord; when one becomes the experiencing of being alive/of it all occurring of its own accord one is then out-from-control (not ‘out of control’ as in wayward) and a different-way-of-being has ensued.
It all becomes rather magical (‘magical’ as in prestidigitation) after that. (Claudiu - Reports of his Meeting Richard & Vineeto)
This ongoing actualism process has been described on this forum in excellent details by @Claudiu (and lots of follow-ups) and recently by @Kuba.
Ok James, pull up the anchor and enjoy being on your way once more.
Cheers Vineeto